On the Identifiability of User Adaptation in Co-Adaptive Neural Interfaces

arXiv:2606.20569v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We analyze identifiability in co-adaptive human-machine systems. We show that closed-loop encoder estimates do not uniquely identify user adaptation, but instead reflect properties of the joint system. We discuss implications for interpreting behavioral adaptation and propose conditions for identification.
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Beyond Fixed Budgets: Characterizing the Inelasticity and Limitations of Tree-of-Thought Reasoning Strategies

arXiv:2606.20599v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tree of Thought (ToT) search has become a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but deploying these methods in practice raises a question that has received little systematic attention: how do different search strategies behave under varying compute budgets, model sizes, and problem difficulties? In this work, we evaluate two representative ToT methods; DPTS, a Monte Carlo tree search based approach, and SSDP, a semantic deduplication based approach, across two mathematical reasoning benchmarks (Math500 and GSM8K), two model scales (Llama-3B and Llama-8B), and four token budgets (3k–10k). Our analysis reveals that the two methods exhibit limitations that pull in opposite directions. DPTS suffers from a cold-start bottleneck at low budgets: it requires sufficient exploration before its value estimates become reliable, making it a poor fit for resource-constrained settings despite strong scaling behavior at higher budgets. SSDP, on the other hand, reaches candidate solutions efficiently but is prone to frontier depletion; its aggressive node merging permanently discards unexplored paths, leaving it unable to improve regardless of how much budget remains. Together, these findings suggest that neither a fixed exploration strategy nor a fixed pruning strategy is sufficient across compute continuum. We argue that effective search for scientific reasoning agents requires strategies that can adapt their behavior based on search progress and available resources.
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The New Associationism: Lessons from Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.20600v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: What can the success of modern AI tell us about how humans learn? This paper argues that taking AI seriously as a model of human learning supports a modest but genuine associationism. The central finding is that supervised learning — learning driven by evaluative feedback — underlies a surprisingly wide range of contemporary AI systems, from large language models to game-playing agents, differing primarily in how much work is required to generate the relevant feedback signal. This vindicates associationist ideals of a uniform, gradual, error-driven learning mechanism operating across domains, and defuses the once-influential argument that associationist mechanisms are too limited to account for human cognitive capacities. At the same time, the successes of deep learning depend on computational architectures that go well beyond anything classical associationists envisaged, and supervised learning operates within these as one component rather than a complete account of learning.
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Specifying AI-SDLC Processes: A Protocol Language for Human-Agent Boundaries

arXiv:2606.20615v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI agents now participate as first-class team members across the software development lifecycle, yet no specification language exists for expressing the human-agent responsibility boundaries, approval gates, and governance constraints this collaboration requires. Existing approaches encode process in agent prompts (subject to drift), target adjacent domains (workflow management, business processes), or address only fragments (access control, approval gates).
We propose a domain-specific language for specifying AI-SDLC processes as protocols, with formal syntax, well-formedness conditions, operational semantics, and enforcement invariants. The language distinguishes policy (declared intent) from mechanism (structural enforcement), enabling implementations to bound process non-determinism through primitives such as validation tokens and capability boundaries.
Three results follow. A failure rate analysis shows that structural enforcement bounds system failure rates at a weighted product of agent and validator rates, while behavioral compliance permits cumulative or near-saturating growth. The 2+N team pattern (two human-in-control roles plus N specialized agent members) formalizes classical Separation of Duties for AI-SDLC. Kleene closure of orchestration loops and reflexive protocol-adherence validation emerge as design properties rather than special-case constructs.
We position the contribution against multi-agent frameworks (MetaGPT), workflow specification (FlowAgent, BPMN extensions), and capability-based security (SAGA): the novelty lies in the specific integration, not any single primitive. A working implementation demonstrates feasibility; empirical evaluation is future work.
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PEAR: Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate

arXiv:2606.20621v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-agent debate improves the reliability of large language models (LLMs) through iterative peer critiques. However, fixed topologies often introduce persistent positional biases, amplify unreliable agents, and cause high sensitivity to role assignments. We introduce textit{Permutation-Equivariant Adaptive Routing Multi-Agent Debate (PEAR)}, an inference-time protocol that dynamically reconfigures communication roles and sparse topologies across consecutive debate rounds. By strategically switching agent-to-role assignments based on evolving agent states, PEAR prevents any agent from permanently occupying a privileged network position or distributes influence more evenly across the debate. We theoretically characterize PEAR as an equivariant sparse router: it preserves accuracy under agent relabeling while reducing routing complexity and improving generalization. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across four reasoning benchmarks and six diverse LLM backbones demonstrate PEAR significantly improves average accuracy over the strongest debate baselines. The code is at https://github.com/EVIEHub/PEAR.
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